Clinton Eligible, Once Again, to Practice Law

BY JOSH GERSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 17, 2006
NY Sun

After five years of banishment from the legal profession, President Clinton
will be eligible this week to reclaim the law license he gave up as a
consequence of the inaccurate responses he gave under oath to questions about
his relationship with a White House intern.

Mr. Clinton's suspension from the Arkansas bar, which he formally agreed to a
day before leaving office in 2001, expires on Thursday. It is unclear whether
the former president will seek reinstatement to the bar, but officials in
Arkansas have been preparing for such a request.

"There are people who have had this date marked on their calendar," the
executive director of the Arkansas Supreme Court's Committee on Professional
Conduct, Stark Ligon, told The New York Sun. He said court rules prevent him
from confirming or denying whether Mr. Clinton has filed an application to be
reinstated until the committee takes some action in the case.

However, Mr. Ligon said such applications are routinely approved. "The
presumption fairly would be that reinstatement should be granted unless some
good cause could be shown why it should not," he said. Mr. Ligon said any
request from Mr. Clinton would be sent by fax or mail to a seven-member
committee panel, which usually acts promptly. "We can generally get a turnaround
within a week to 10 days," the bar official said.

A spokesman for Mr. Clinton, Jay Carson, declined to comment Sunday on
whether the former president wants to rejoin the bar. The attorney who
represented Mr. Clinton in earlier proceedings related to his law license, David
Kendall, also declined to be interviewed on the subject.

Since leaving the White House, Mr. Clinton has shown no sign of being
encumbered by his lack of a law license.

He has built his charitable foundation into a major player in the delivery of
anti-AIDS medicines to poor countries around the world and has joined with
President George H.W. Bush in fund-raising appeals to rebuild from disasters
such as the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Clinton also has given
dozens of paid speeches for fees of $100,000 to $300,000 each.

"He has been one busy human being," a former senator from Arkansas, David
Pryor, said in an interview yesterday. Mr. Pryor, who runs a University of
Arkansas school affiliated with Mr. Clinton's presidential library, said he
doubted the former president would want to join a firm in Little Rock. "I cannot
fathom him coming down here practicing law, but other than that, who knows?" the
former senator said. "If you start speculating what President Clinton is going
to do, you'd be in trouble."

A professor of legal ethics at New York University, Stephen Gillers, said he
expected Mr. Clinton would seek to reclaim his Arkansas bar membership. "It
would just be personal vindication," the professor said. "If he is admitted, he
may see it as confirmation of his claim that the original transgression was not
as bad as some made it out to be."

Mr. Gillers said a law license also could help Mr. Clinton financially, by
allowing him to become a rainmaker at a New York or Washington law firm. "There
are a lot of law firms that might be quite happy to have him as part of the firm
because of the business-getting potential," he said.

While there appears to be little standing in the way of Mr. Clinton's
reinstatement to the Arkansas bar, rules for admission in New York and
Washington could pose a challenge to him quickly joining those bars. Admission
by reciprocity to the New York bar requires that an applicant show that he or
she has spent five of the last seven years working as a lawyer.

A former official with the New York Board of Law Examiners, James Fuller,
said the rule is enforced strictly. "I don't know what they'd say about the
presidency - if that qualified. I'd doubt it," Mr. Fuller said.

A similar rule would appear to dictate a five-year delay in Mr. Clinton's
admission to the bar in the nation's capital, chiefly because he took the bar
examination so long ago.

Mr. Clinton, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1973, has spent only a few
years practicing law. He served as attorney general of Arkansas from 1977 to
1979. He also worked at a Little Rock law firm from 1980 to 1982, between stints
as governor.

Mr. Gillers noted that at any point Mr. Clinton could try to gain admission
to the New York or Washington bars by taking the bar examination. Like other bar
applicants, he would also have to demonstrate good moral character.

Mr. Clinton agreed to give up his Arkansas law license for five years as part
of a three-way deal struck with the Arkansas Committee on Professional Conduct
and Robert Ray, the independent counsel who took over the investigation into the
president's statements about an intern, Monica Lewinsky. In the pact, Mr.
Clinton acknowledged that some answers he gave about Ms. Lewinsky during a 1998
deposition were false and that he "knowingly gave misleading and evasive
answers." However, he maintained that he did not intend to lie. The allegations
were some of the same made against Mr. Clinton in articles of impeachment that
were passed by the House but rejected by the Senate.

The U.S. Supreme Court also suspended Mr. Clinton from its bar in 2000. He
officially announced he would contest his disbarment, but later resigned.

Arkansas bar discipline officials received complaints about Mr. Clinton from
a variety of sources, including the federal judge who oversaw the case where the
former president testified. However, no public action was taken until 2000, when
a conservative legal group, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, won an order from
the Arkansas Supreme Court mandating that the discipline process go forward.

The attorney who handled the case for the foundation, Lynn Hogue, said in an
interview Saturday that he is not inclined to resist the former president
recovering his legal credentials. "My only point was that the conduct of lying
to a grand jury, particularly when done by a lawyer who was not just an ordinary
lawyer but who held the highest office in the land, should not go unchallenged
and should not go unpunished," said Mr. Hogue, a law professor at Georgia State
University. "I think the punishment was appropriate and basically he's served
his time. Should he want to seek reinstatement, I don't think that's a problem."